Ω

If the man who tells you that he writes, paints, sculptures, or sings for his own amusement, gives his work to the public, he lies; he lies if he puts his name to his writing, painting, statue, or song. He wishes, at the least, to leave behind a shadow of his spirit, something that may survive him…The man of letters who shall tell you that he despises fame is a lying rascal.

Everyone who writes, I have no doubt, would like to be famous, and not only famous now, while on this earth, but, embarrassing enough to admit given the odds, famous after he has departed the earth. And this, I believe, is true of serious and frivolous writers alike.

Well! I’m not a man of letters, of course; I’m just another vandal tagging the alleyways of the web with my digital graffiti. But as a paid-up member of the Frivolous Writers Local 301, I feel authoritative enough to declare that this is bunk. Unamuno may be talking about the literary equivalent of those ’90s rock stars who, having gone through all the considerable effort of forming a band, gigging regularly, signing to a major label, and heavily promoting their albums, proceeded to gripe incessantly about how stifling and inauthentic it all was. In those cases, yes, it’s hard to take such complaints seriously. If you don’t want fame and fortune, there are plenty of off-ramps to take long before you get to the big time. But why should it be so hard to accept the idea of the devoted amateur who loves his work precisely because it’s not a job with all the trappings and compromises that entails? I could probably adjust to being rich — certainly willing to give it my best effort! — but fame? What on Earth would be the point of that?

This leads to my theory of what it is that Watterson might be doing, and I suspect that some of it is about control. Comic strips are all about control. It’s the one art form where you have full control. It’s not collaborative like a film. It’s not collaborative even like a book, where your editor changes things. I really don’t even have an editor. It’s just me. It’s not collaborative like a tv show. It’s not collaborative like a record album. It’s you — it’s just you.

When you wander into licensing, it becomes a collaboration. Somebody at your syndicate has to approve it. Somebody at your syndicate gives suggestions. Somebody at your syndicate says,”You know, that’s nice, but it’d be better if he smiled on the package, right? Smiling sells more.” Then it gets in the hand of the designer. The designer has their own ideas how the character should look. The designer knows what material sells. The designer knows what materials are safe. Then there’s the designer’s boss, who may have different ideas, ’cause they gave it to the salesman, and it didn’t sell well.

So I’ve just introduced seven people into my life that weren’t in my life before. I don’t particularly like any of them. They’re not my kind of people. They’re commercial people, and they make your stomach hurt when you’re with them. So I’ve introduced an element into my life of a whole bunch of people I don’t like. I’ve got to overcome them all, even if it’s so much as just saying, “I don’t think we should do this,” and they say yes, I still have to do that to seven people. And that’s all a loss of control, a loss of control that I never had before, right?

And imagine if he started licensing. The first lunchbox would have sold nine billion, right? The minute that happens, everybody is gonna be on him for all the more, like this, that, and the other — all represents a loss of control. Then they all sit in your head. Rather than go, as he probably did, and walk through the forest that day, he took six phone calls that he didn’t want to take. They interrupted his day. They’re floating around in his head. That’s all bad. You know what I’m saying?

And that’s control. That’s not about artistic purity. No, no. That’s about control.

This is my attitude toward blogging, toward ambition. I don’t pretend to be doing anything artistically, let alone culturally, significant here, but this is still an important space for me, where I can write for the pure enjoyment it gives me. A few people have suggested that I could or should make a living by doing some sort of writing, but my response is always the same — making this into a paying job would destroy everything that makes it enjoyable. It would be death by a thousand cuts. Keeping it “pure” isn’t about snobbery and status, it’s about having something in your life that isn’t subject to mercenary considerations.

Fortunately, I’ll never be offered a spot writing at Buzzfeed or the like, where I would have to make those sorts of compromises, so I have to admit it’s easy for me to say that. I am truly in awe of the fact that Watterson was looking at potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in merchandising and still held to his principles. Would I absolutely refuse to write clickbaity headlines about trivia and gossip if doing so meant I never had to work a real job again? I’d like to think so, but…

While reading this book, I came across an anonymously sourced description of a “yinshih”, which greatly appealed to me. A quick search of the term made it clear that Alphonse Vinh must have been that very source, because his response to Andrew Rogers is nearly a word-for-word version of what I read with a few extra details, even:

You asked me what a yinshih was. Well, a yinshih means in Classical Chinese, a scholar-recluse, which is my vocation in life. Yinshihs have existed in every place and time (Walker Percy was a Southern yinshih and Joseph Joubert was a French one); but in East Asian culture, they had an honoured place at one time. Many were poets and writers. Some were mystics. Others were retired scholars who sought a quiet life of spirituality and solitude. But what they all had in common was that they had renounced the ‘red dust of the world’ and were dead to worldly ambition and desire for career success. Yinshihs renounce all this. The fortunate ones lived in the days of the Empire like many of my ancestors who could write their farewell poems to the world at age 40, “hang up their scholar’s cap”, and leave the Imperial Civil Service to take refuge on their estates or their little cottages or huts to devote themselves to contemplation, prayer, study, solitude, literature, and friendship. Very few yinshihs rejected the pleasures of poetry and wine. They did not hate the world—only its unworthy and spiritually uninteresting temptations.

In times of great societal corruption, yinshihs withdrew from society and public service in order to preserve their integrity, no matter the cost to them. Yinshihs have always been gentlemen and lovers of the life of the mind. But they care not for conventions nor do they care much for being in the right society or climbing up the slimy pole of success. They don’t care about such things because they think it’s more beautiful to sip wine whilst sitting in their hermitage as the sun sets in the fields before them. They cherish not the group so much as the individual. They are not meant for the big stage but prefer the quiet life in the shadows where it is possible to observe the stream flowing quietly beneath the waves.

Yinshihs suffer all the afflictions of humanity and sin greatly too. But it is their way to strive not to contribute to the general suffering of humanity by their own failings. Their ministry through writing and personal friendship is with the individual person whom God may send their way.

Yinshihs are happy about things that may not occur to more society-oriented people and there’s a chasm of understanding or appreciation between both sides. They do not see their way as better but simply as a reasonable, individual alternative to a group-oriented, power-driven, society-focused way of existence. Yinshihs are the first to admire that famous phrase, “A Southern Gentleman’s vocation is being and thinking.” If yinshihs have to scratch a living in the world, they will strive to do so with integrity and good will, but they will always see their livelihood as a means to live fully a yinshih life—away from the world. Yinshihs don’t know the meaning of careers. It’s meaningless to them. They care about their place within this beautiful and mysterious universe that God created, they care about worthwhile friendships and good poetry, and if they have to earn their living in the world, they feel they will have gained their right to dream in their real life after the working day is over. Yinshihs value, above all, the inner universe of the individual and the private life which they regard as most holy.

Research suggests that in the Olympics, those who finish third are likely to be a lot happier than those who finish second. The reason is that much of our thinking is based on counterfactuals. We like to ask: What else could have happened?

If you finish second, you tend to think that with a little good luck, or maybe a bit of extra effort or skill, you might have gotten the prize of a lifetime: Olympic gold. But if you finish third, you tend to think that with a little bad luck, or without that extra effort or skill, you wouldn’t have gotten the prize of a lifetime: an Olympic medal.

My boss and I were on a road trip yesterday, getting some new equipment activated. He was interested to hear all about the world of bookselling, and the conversation naturally turned toward reading for personal enjoyment. “You know, Scribbler, I used to love reading, but…” He shook his head. “Y’know, you get married, then the kids come along… most days, I get home in the evenings, eat dinner, play with the kids. I try to grab at least 15-20 minutes of actual conversation with my wife, and then, if I open a book before bed, it’s like five minutes, and BOOM.” He closed his eyes and dropped his chin to his chest.

He told me about his former job, working for a global shipping company in New York, how cool it was to have to look up all these faraway cities he’d never heard of and see them on a map. “One day, Scribbler, one day…!” he said, pointing upward with a determined look, “I’m actually going to travel to these places. And I’m going to have time to read when I get back!” He said his wife fantasizes about being able to read a trashy magazine all the way through. “Just to be able to read a copy of US Weekly, uninterrupted; she wants that so bad. I say to her, don’t worry, in several years, they won’t want to have anything to do with us, and we’ll have time for that!”

We didn’t actually talk a whole lot, because he spent most of his time making and receiving calls, getting ready for this massive snowstorm that’s got me chillin’ at home in the middle of the day today. As we were getting off the exit to head back to base, he ended his last call and sighed. “ARRGH, these are the days I hate the most, Scribbler. Trying to keep tabs on 80 employees, trying to make contingency plans with dozens of clients for tomorrow, looking forward to getting my ass chewed in the next conference call…”

“That’s why I like having simple jobs,” I said.

“Yeah, not aging prematurely due to stress,” he said with a slightly forced laugh.

Anyway, yes, to return to the original point: my own experience confirms that setting your sights lower seems to lead to more genuine contentment. I’m fine with my metaphorical bronze medals.

But for all that there is another, more honest way in which old-school blogging has become actually egalitarian, grimy and uncool in the way real egalitarianism is. I like blogging now because whatever vestigial coolness it once had was gone. So now it really is what it was once sold as: just a repository of words. And there is a real, quiet, unsexy kind of egalitarianism in just words, a very basic fairness that doesn’t function as a social mechanism even in an online space where everything is some message about who you’re with. I’ve written a few times for Medium, and somebody said to me, conspiratorially, at a party, “You know, Medium’s very uncool.” And I just had no idea! God, the freedom! Joy for me is living outside of signalling.

Likewise, until this morning, I had absolutely no idea that Line 6 amps were regarded as “the butt of gear jokes” by people who care about such things. But one commenter assures us that they are “one of THE most hated amps amongst the respected audiophile and musician community.” Not just any audiophile and musician community; the respected one!

The last guy I worked on music with introduced me to Line 6 equipment. He worked as a manager of a music store, so he got to experiment with anything he wanted, and that was what he favored. I was instantly sold on their guitar pod, and being just a simple fellow who knows what he likes, I never saw any reason to keep up with the latest gear after that. Like so many good Germans, though, I was apparently allowing my blissful ignorance to provide cover for heinous crimes against audio.

As for blogging, barely a week has gone by over the last several years without seeing another epitaph for it. Even that pose has gotten old, though, so now we learn that the real “fascinating and challenging” writing is happening on a bunch of platforms I hadn’t even heard of, with the Ouroboros apparently ready to start devouring Twitter now. Ah, well, I suppose being fashionable is its own punishment — what more could you wish on people like that than to be perpetually dissatisfied, always afraid of missing out or being left behind? Me, I’m content being a Brian Wilson “In My Room” sort of man-child, spending my time on the fringe, shielded by others’ dismissive contempt.

But this job was different from any I’d seen before. We wore jeans. We piped in Hall & Oates. We told a lot of jokes while cranking out a lot of assignments. The designers weren’t aggrieved by the concept of labor. Rather, they wore sneakers and Walkmans, they drove crappy little Hondas that rattled with old cans of Tab, and they all talked of things—were defined by things—other than the work before them. Music and friends, hiking and television, babies and dogs and tacos. I remember thinking: now this is what work should be like: something you don’t loathe or love, but like well enough.

Gen X had witnessed what its parents had done in the name of Mercedes or making ends meet (depending on economic class), and we pledged to set our sights on careers that we weren’t beholden to. We wanted jobs that helped us to live but weren’t life itself.

…So now, here we Gen Xers are, more or less in our 40s, with neither fame nor fortune, just the freedom that comes with what we do being quite different from who we are.

“Hey, Joe. How’s work?”

“Doesn’t suck.”

“That’s great.”

…Is “hapathy” a word? I don’t know. I just think the overarching theme for Gen Xers is one of happy apathy. The whole Buddhist approach to living teaches non-attachment, in that “attachment is the origin, the root of suffering; hence it is the cause of suffering.”

Well, Generation X sure got its Zen on by watching marriages dissolve, the Berlin Wall fall, the stock market crash, a president get shot, the Space Shuttle explode, and Fonzie jump the shark. We grew up accepting that nothing was permanent—not the economy, not the Metric Conversion Act of 1975, not even the lead singer for Van Halen. To top it all off, all of our music has been ripped apart and remixed. All of our movies remade. Even Twinkies had to be resuscitated and I hear they taste different now. Because of this, we’ve learned not to get too attached. And because of this, we’re content.

A hermit does not threaten human society, of which he is at most the living critique.

The vagabond steals and scrounges. The rebel-of-the-moment declaims on TV. The anarchist dreams of destroying the society in which he conceals himself. Today’s hacker plots the collapse of virtual citadels in his bedroom. The anarchist tinkers with his bombs in saloons, while the hacker arms his programs at his computer, but both need the society they deplore and target for its destruction — which is their raison d’être.

The hermit stays off to one side in polite refusal, like a guest who, with a gentle gesture, declines the proffered dish. If society disappeared, the hermit would go on living as a hermit. Those in revolt against society, however, would find themselves technically out of work. The hermit does not oppose, but espouses a way of life. He seeks not to denounce a lie, but to find a truth. He is physically inoffensive and is tolerated as if he belonged to an intermediate order, a caste halfway between barbarians and civilized people. The chivalrous hero of the twelfth-century epic poem Yvain, the Knight with the Lion, driven mad by the loss of his lady love, wanders naked in a forest until he is taken in and cared for by a hermit, who restores his reason and leads him back to civilization. The hermit: a passeur, a go-between of worlds.

Consider the work of writing, for example. Once upon a time, I wrote academic papers with an eye on promotion. But I also hoped — and still hope — that they might actually influence something in the world. How hard would I work on an academic paper if I knew for sure that only a few people would ever read it? What if I knew for sure that no one would ever read my work? Would I still do it? Much of what I do in life, including writing my blog posts, articles, and these pages, is driven by ego motivations that link my effort to the meaning that I hope the readers of these words will find in them. Without an audience, I would have very little motivation to work as hard as I do.

Now think about blogging. The number of blogs out there is astounding, and it seems that almost everyone has a blog or is thinking about starting one. Why are blogs so popular? Not only is it because so many people have the desire to write; after all, people wrote before blogs were invented. It is also because blogs have two features that distinguish them from other forms of writing. First, they provide the hope or the illusion that someone else will read one’s writing. After all, the moment a blogger presses the “publish” button, the blog can be consumed by anybody in the world, and with so many people connected, somebody, or at least a few people, should stumble upon the blog. Indeed, the “number of views” statistic is a highly motivating feature in the blogosphere because it lets the blogger know exactly how many people have at least seen the posting. Blogs also provide readers with the ability to leave their reactions and comments — gratifying for both the blogger, who now has a verifiable audience, and the reader-cum-writer. Most blogs have very low readership —perhaps only the blogger’s mother or best friend reads them — but even writing for one person, compared to writing for nobody, seems to be enough to compel millions of people to blog.

Of course, most of those people give up after the novelty fades, too — I just happened to see a citation claiming that 60% of blogs are inactive within four months. As for me, I’ve published over 1700 posts, most of which have only gotten a few dozen pageviews each. My most-viewed post is one from a few years ago where I included an image of a stone carving of Priapus in a post about Tiger Woods’s rampant horndoggery. Once I removed the image out of irritation with the attention, I finally stopped getting daily visits from Eastern Europeans with a weird thing for pictures of giant stone schlongs. And thus, my chance at the big time of blogging was gone…

I find the concept of the audience to be useful — envisioning even a generic reader helps keep one’s prose from getting lost in solipsist shorthand. But I still firmly believe that the dividing line between good conversation and rabble babble gets crossed very quickly; in fact, I’d probably revise that earlier estimate downward, from twenty participants to ten. People think and act differently when part of a group than they do as individuals; they raise their voice to be heard above a din and act more extreme to stand out from the crowd. Once the audience is too numerous to maintain personal relationships, things will go the way of most sites with large comment sections.

True, having even a tiny audience can provide a little extra motivation and enjoyment, but still, most of it comes from the writing itself, from the thrill of fine-tuning one’s thoughts and expressing them with even a modicum of style. When I read perspectives like Ariely’s, I can hardly believe my good fortune — it’s like I’ve discovered an ongoing free lunch buffet, or a perpetual motion machine. What makes me so odd? Why do I feel both motivated and gratified by the chance to work unobserved and live unnoticed? Long may it continue in any event.

We learn about it from Plutarch, who tells us that Epicurus was famous for the maxim “live unnoticed”…To “live unnoticed” means to live a completely private life, with no involvement, beyond what might be obligatory for all citizens, in the public life of one’s community or country, and also with no ambitions for making a mark in any other public realm — in any of the arts or professions, for example.

…It seems obvious that the more exposed one’s life is to the attentions of the public, and, in general, to those of any wide circle of nonintimates, the more one risks one runs of potential harmful interference from them. The general run of people are more inclined to envy and ingratitude than honoring honest good service, or simply reciprocating favors…

Thus for Epicurus the default position is to live a life of devotion to one’s private affairs, letting public and political interests take care of themselves, or rather letting them get taken care of by those foolish enough to go in for such things. The hope is that by keeping out of the limelight one can live happily, in peace and quiet, surrounded, and both protected and advanced in one’s pursuit of pleasure, by one’s family, and by a circle of intimate, like-minded friends.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.

To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble. Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it’s going to come in handy all the time.

Somehow, until I saw Maria Popova’s link, there had been a Watterson-commencement-speech-shaped hole in my experience of which I had been unaware. Glad that’s fixed now.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.